After Seasat’s premature demise,[10] scientists from the federally funded Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Geophysical Institute developed the concept of a ground station in Fairbanks, Alaska, to receive data from foreign satellites.
[11] In 1986, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory requested and approved a quotation for the integration of a receiving ground station, the Alaska SAR Facility, at UAF.
[14] The Satellite-Tracking Ground Station launched in 1990,[15] and in 1994 a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between NASA and UAF formed the ASF Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC).
At this point, ASF was handling data from the original three satellite missions that spurred the science community into envisioning this facility.
In November 2002, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) appointed UAF as agent[20] for the data acquisition, processing, and distribution to support the Japanese Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) mission, which featured Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR).
Due to the agreements with many of the foreign agencies involved, at first much of the foreign-source DAAC data was restricted distribution[26] to NASA-approved scientists only.
The ground station's prime polar location[1] in Fairbanks enables the facility to service high-inclination, polar-orbiting, Earth-imaging spacecraft.
[1] The facility has evolved over the past 20 years into a full-service station,[1] providing telemetry downlink, uplink, command and two-way coherent tracking services as one of 15 major members of the international Near Earth Network,[35] which is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.